An examination of speculative fiction through a lens of verisimilitude.

Saturday, 14 March 2015

Magic as Tech, and the Time-Tech Conundrum in Fantasy Writing

A thousand years ago, the greatest wizard of all time, Evil Fred, was cast away into another dimension, but now he is about to return and threatens to conquer the world!

Sound
familiar? It is the basis of a zillion fantasy stories including The Lord of the Rings. But I have an
issue with this plot. If Evil Fred was alive during the technological
equivalent of medieval Europe, what would the world look like upon his return? If
the fantasy world in question progressed as our real world did, wouldn’t his
deadly fireballs seem a bit dated when he showed up to rule the 21st
century? At best, he could get a job at a Renaissance Fair.

The
heart of the issue is that most of us (directly influenced by Tolkien?) want
our fantasy worlds to be forever set in a medieval world, albeit one with
‘magic’. This obviously begs a few difficult questions. Unless the world was
created in an iron age, the technology must have developed from earlier techs,
so did it stop developing or are we just witnessing a certain a point in the
world’s history? If this is the case, what is the time-span of the fabula,
including the history that is necessary to make it function (e.g. is there a
relic that was created 1000 years earlier and, if so, was the knowledge and
craft available)? If a culture was able to make a really cool sword 1000 years
previously, why are they still only making swords (not nukes) and why is that
old sword still important?

Before
exploring possible answers, you may need to consider what constitutes ‘magic’
in your world. I will address this question more deeply in a separate blog post,
but what’s important here is the methodology of the magic. If the power can or
must be learned and it relies on a set of rules, then there is probably a science to it. I would suggest that the
typical fantasy wizard casts ‘magic’ that operates in this fashion. Again,
using The Lord of the Rings as an
example, when the elves are asked about their ‘magic’, they seem confused
because, to them, it is simply science[1] (thus demonstrating
Clarke’s “law” that any technology advanced enough will indistinguishable from magic
to the uneducated[2]). Why does this matter? Because, if
magic is the science of the day, then it should advance along with the
technology (in fact, it probably drives it forward). In my early example, Evil
Fred’s fireballs are outdated not because he returned to a world that had nukes
simply growing on trees, but because those nukes are the direct intellectual
descendants of Fred’s fireball spell. For this reason, you really can’t
separate technology from ‘magic’, and both should become more sophisticated
through time.

So,
if this presents a problem for your plot, how do you fix the time-tech
conundrum? Well, to be honest, you probably don’t need to. I think most fantasy
readers will give you a pass on this. Still, addressing the topic would make
your world more interesting. Here are a few ideas that I have toyed with. None
of them are perfect, but they may be good starting points.

Science
and industry, at a high level, may require the support of a centralized
government. If this collapses, a golden era may go with it. Baghdad, a city not
currently known for its scientific prowess, was one of the brightest
intellectual lights in the western world from the 9-12th centuries[3]. Historians are not
really sure why it all fell apart (though it is easy to blame theocratic
repression, this can’t be the sole issue because the city was a religious centre
during its apex as well[3] – certainly the
Mongol invasions didn’t help[4]). The important thing
about a golden scholarly age such as Baghdad’s, however, is that information
was diligently recorded and travels to and from the city was extensive enough
that much of the knowledge was translated into other languages and locations
before the collapse. Even if Baghdad had burned to the ground, the knowledge
would not have perished from the earth (this is partially true for the material
at the library at Alexandria as well, though the destruction of the library
occurred approximately 1000 years earlier and it is not known how much unique material
was lost[5]). If you are going
to propose that a large amount of advanced technologies were lost, you may want
to consider how those technologies advanced so far in secret and died with
their generations of creators.

You
could rationalize your world’s scientific stasis by limiting its population. The
industrial revolution required much more than just knowledge; it required large
cities and a society with loads of specialization in its population[6]. If a world (such as
Middle-Earth) has only a few million people[7], then it probably
would not undergo such a shift. Why the population of this world has not
increased due to technological
advances (in agriculture, for example), as it did in real world history[6], is a more subtle
problem that you may want to consider. Furthermore, if your magic is a science,
you might still be stuck explaining how research could have progressed far
enough to create powerful spells, yet other technologies have lagged behind.

One
possible answer to the time-tech conundrum may be to set a tech ceiling. Production
of ‘magic’ or a certain technology (if you can even separate those two
concepts) could lead to a specific type of global catastrophic event (with more
powerful magical spells fuelling the problem proportionally). This would knock
everything back until the cycle started again. If the set-backs were global in
scale, affecting all aspects of society, then it would also help to address the
idea that scientific discoveries can’t be stopped from happening once the societal
and technical pieces are in place to drive them (for example, even if Darwin
had never existed, we know that the mechanisms of evolution would have been
established, as Alfred Russell Wallace independently found them shortly after
Darwin did -- but would it have been so if all of the world’s intellectual progress
had been set back?). Of course, some of the earlier knowledge (pre-collapse) would
persist, so the cycle would be shorter each time, but only a certain level of
industry could be reached. This answer (my favourite one) is obviously
influenced by real world concepts of global warming and the threats of global thermonuclear
war, each of which may set limits on our real-world global prosperity, so it might
sound too modern for your setting, but it might also lend the explanation
credibility.

And so, as Evil Fred is led away in energy-binds, he can overhear the elvish children’s schoolyard banter through the chain-link fence:

“A fireball?! Did that old dude really just cast a fireball?”“Yeah, totally lame, right?”“We did that in class, but we didn’t bother with the fire; we just started with atomics.”“Really!? I can’t wait til I’m in 6th grade; our teacher still has us doing plasma-based stuff.”“Aww, man, don’t wait til 6th grade, just look it up on Magipedia; it’s all there...”

4 comments:

Two revisions to my post:1) If magic is usable (e.g. by a sorcerer) but not understood by that user (akin to the way that I can write this sentence even if I can't explain to a neurobiologist which parts of my brain allow me to do so and why), then my thesis falls apart. This might be a good answer to why fireballs don't evolve into nukes. 2) Magic might not fuel technology, but could stifle it. Winchell Chung presents this view very well in The Porcelain Argument:http://www.lostkingdom.net/the-porcelain-argument-magic-versus-technology/

About Me

I taught
science for more than 20 years at the university level (and to general
audiences) before moving to London. I recently finished an MSc in Science Communication and am attempting to break into science and factual media presentation.